“So, how’s the party doing?”
“They’re dealing with the new Slayer’s disbelief”
“Apparently the normal method is to have Donald Sutherland start chucking knives at her.”
So someone’s come up with a nifty way of relating the Meyers-Briggs personality test to gaming. I thought I’d look it over and see how I fit.
I know I’m an INFP in real life, pretty strongly in all cases; I think my lowest percentage, the last time I took the test, was 64%. (I am not going to link to a MB test–anyone with even elementary Google-fu should be able to find one.) What about in gaming?
I/E: Introverts are those that approach a game primarily through their character. Extroverts are those who approach the game primarily through the world, setting, or situation. If you want to play in the world of Wheel of Time, you’re going the E road. If you want to play a farmer who grows into a great leader, in whatever setting, you’re going the I road.
I’m gonna say I’m I here. While I have been known to be drawn into a cool setting, it’s usually because I’m interested in the kinds of characters one can play there, rather than because I want to explore the setting itself.
N/S: Intuitives are basically No-Mythers, and Sensers are big Mythers. If you want the game to focus on tangible, repeatable, discrete elements you’re walking the road of S. If you’re more interested in the concepts, themes, and abstracts of the game then you are embarking on the path of N.
I’m not, honestly, certain what this one means, but I think I’m an N. Not a very strong preference, though.
T/F: This one changes very little between standard and game. If you think your way through game, want to focus on the logic, an intellectual appreciation, then you are on the Tower of T. If, otoh, you want game to be about feeling you way through, focusing on the emotionality, and having a gut level appreciation of game then you’re on the ship of F.
F, all the way. I like logic and it’s fun to see how everything fits together, but I like emotion more, and I want to be involved with things.
J/P: Mo and I called this one Pressure (J) and Flow (P). Judging gamers want to hit it and quit it, they want discrete goals, short run games, quick closure, and games full of pressure that they can make statements about and through. Perceiving gamers want more flowing games, stories that flow into each other, long running campaigns, either no closure or closure that flows into a new story, and games that are about enjoying the flow rather than increasing the pressure.
I think I’m J here, but not very strongly. I like long-running campaigns, but I don’t want to go forever between interesting stuff, either. If we’re having 6 months of downtime, I want the GM to say, “OK, what do you do in the next six months? OK. When you get back together…”
So in gaming, InFj.
What about my characters? They tend to be a lot more about their interactions with the world, in that they expect to have an effect on it; this leads me to suspect that most of them are usually E. I’ve got problems enough trying to deal with my own intuition, so my characters are usually S–I don’t go for “immersion” in the sense most people seem to mean it. The characters are usually F, though, in that they’re more likely to rely on their own sense of right and wrong than on just logic. And I’m going to say they’re usually P, but not strongly.
For me, super powers and SfX only screw things up and make the game boring. You can have very fun five hours of gaming just talking about your angst leaving your (in the game…) girlfriend. I promise.
Excuse me while I shudder. Thanks, but no, I do not wish to play in this game. 5 minutes, sure. But if all you’re gonna do is wank about how much your life sucks, you might as well talk about real life, because at least that way you might be working out actual issues.
Just read this post, I guess, and marvel at the arrogance and condescension that come off it in waves. Read the bit by Ron Edwards, who manages to produce good games despite no apparent ability to distinguish between “what I like” and “what is good”:
I’ve had it with games in which the characters are specially-powered in any way whatsoever.
And yeah, I wrote games about sorcerers, magical elfs, and tall babes with horns on their heads. That’s done with.
No more. People in situations, from now on.
Explain again what it is about having extraordinary powers that makes a person any less of a person, or their situation any less of a situation? Seems to me, from my plebian, low-class, unenlightened position, that having the powers increases the range of people and situations you can talk about–which ought to be only a good thing. But what do I know?
I’m running a character that uses a non-PHB class, to wit the wu jen from Complete Arcane. One of the things about this class is that, every ~3 levels, you have to pick a “taboo”, something your character isn’t allowed to do lest she lose her spellcasting ability for a day.
My problem with this is that most of the example taboos are things that you don’t, in D&D, really have to deal with. “Oh, by the way, I never cut my hair,” you say, and voìla! your taboo for that level is fulfilled. Even stuff like “make a small sacrifice once a day” doesn’t specify that you actually have to spend any money on it–heck, you could say that you prick your finger every day before memorizing spells, and that’d cover it.
So for Altariel’s 3rd-level taboo, I picked one I’m actually going to have to roleplay: Cannot lie. (Note that this is in the sense of “cannot make an untrue statement”, rather than “cannot allow someone to come to the wrong conclusion based on what I say”, but still, it makes perfect sense.) If the universe is to be expected to listen to me when I say there’s a fireball over there, I can’t go around telling lies about other things, now can I?
Got a look at the Serenity rpg last night. Overall, it looked pretty cool and I was favorably impressed, but there were some nitpicks.
The system appears to be that you have some target number, which you must equal or exceed in order to do whatver you’re trying to do. All of your attributes and skills are assigned a value by way of the size of the die you roll when you use them–that is, if you’re Jayne your brawn gets d10 and your smarts get a d4; if you’re Simon it’s vice-versa. Bonuses and penalties happen by changing the size of the die some number of steps. I have never encountered this mechanic before, but I rather like it; it makes it so an expert can still fail, but does so less often than a novice, and that this happens with a frequency that’s easy to see. It’s pretty clear that someone rolling a d4 is only going to beat a 3 half the time, while someone with a d12 will do so 5 times out of 6. I’d have to see it in play to know how well it works, but on the whole it looks promising.
I must also confess a liking for any game which includes such ads and disads as “Leaky Brainpan”, “Moneyed Individual”, and “Sweet and Cheerful”. But this leads into one of my problems: the whole book is written in the Ole West Hick dialect, including explainations of mechanics and examples of play. It gets gratin’ right quick, if you catch my drift.
I didn’t have time to take a thorough look at all the background info they provided, but one bit I did see was the money system. Turns out a Firefly “credit” has about the buying power of $25, for shades of B5 (though if I recall correctly the disparity there was less). There’s also coin, which disdains such intuitive systems as “straight decimal” in favor of something that works out to the smallest coin being worth 40 cents–it was along the lines of $25>1 credit>2.5 platinum (1 p=$10)>5 gold (1 g=$5)>62.5 silver (1 s=40 cents). I may be misremebering, because, well, nonintuituve. I know that the British Empire got along with a horrendously nonintuitive currency for literally a thousand years–remind me again how many shillings in a guinea?–but still. This is gaming, I don’t want it to be accountancy too…
Having recently purchased Weapons of Legacy (which I shouldn’t have, because I am poor, but that’s not relevant really), I am really liking the idea of an item that gets better as you level. The base item has to be magic, but can cost no more than 4000 gp; you have to perform a series of rituals to “unlock” the item’s powers, which you can’t do any earlier than 5th level. These rituals are based on events that took place over the history of the item and cost money but not xp (and you have to use Knowledge (history) checks and/or spells like legend lore to find out how to perform them). Also there are personal costs, which are in theory balanced by the powers of the item. I think Altariel needs one of these items, and given her projected career (10 levels of electrical elemental savant) it should be something that relates to electricity.
Given that standard D&D uses the 4-element system (Altariel uses a more “oriental” 5-element, in which electricity is linked to metal), I’m going to go with electricity>lightning>air>mind and use a +2 headband of intellect as the base item. This comes in exactly at the 4000 gp limit. Clearly, Lightning’s Heart should grant access to the Energy Substitution (electricity) feat, and there are a bunch of powers on the lists in the back of the book that fit the theme nicely: grants castings of lighning bolt, chain lightning and energy resistance some times per day, gives ability bonuses–Int in this case, of course–grants haste for some number of rounds per day, that sort of thing. Where I’m falling down is the backstory.
Clearly, if I want a powerful item I should be willing to put in some effort for it, but I’m just totally blanking. I hesitate to say “Can’t I just pay the gold costs and handwave it?”, but it’s awfully tempting. The job is made more difficult by the fact that the stories in Weapons of Legacy vary between “This event caused this power” and “This character, the original owner, has a cool backstory, and by the way the item can do this nifty thing now”.
Also, neato house rule I heard lately: Epic characters (21st level and up) can’t be raised from the dead because, if they die, the gods on the planes they end up on look at them and say, “Hmmm, you’re useful; you’re sticking around.”
There are few things that will turn me off a gaming website faster than the words Trump, Pattern, or [random Amber character name]. I just don’t give a damn; I don’t like Amber all that much and I don’t want to game in it, and the descriptions of the Amber RPG I’ve read strike me as intensely dumb. Also a formula for the GM to do whatever the heck he wants, even more than most RPGs in which he has to at least make a pretense of rolling dice.
Plus, the whole Trump thing is just an excuse for people to do bad photomanipulation.
I am looking at the playtest file for Bliss Stage, an anime rpg, and I am totally not worthy. The mechanics could use some work, I suspect, but the concepts…it’s beautifully grim in that way that only anime can be.
I am officially not allowed to post any of it, but if people want to see it lemme know. Too bloody cool.
In the Sunday night Dragonstar game, my character has recently had some bad experiences–basically, seeing that her homeworld is being run by an imposter (of her) who is the tool of the chaotic evil black dragons. Cordelia (and that is her real name and she’s not going to forget it, thank you) is True Neutral, though she really wants to be Neutral Good, and she’s basically a social monster (as opposed to a combat monster or a skill monster or whatever).
There’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem with Cordelia’s preferred method for working out negative feelings; does she use sex because she’s a social monster, or is she a social monster because using sex required her to become one? Girl’s also got some identity issues, in that a large chunk of her skills are focused on allowing her to pretend to be other people, and in fact her continued existence depends heavily on not claiming her real name in public…but her recent trip to her homeworld showed her that her unclaimable identity as Grand Duchess of Vorbarra is actually important to her. For that matter, she’s come to regret telling the other PCs that they should call her Ekaterin, her usual nom de guerre, even in private.
Now, D&D is not what you’d call Narrative-focused. In fact it’s the flagship of Gamist gaming–witness how easy it is to gimp a character at first level with a bad feat choice. So an important character issue, which in some games might be handled with “Secret Identity” or “Identity Issues” or whatnot on the character sheet, is instead a matter of me telling the GM that Cordelia makes it a point to use her own face whenever it’s not advisable to be someone else.
Right. So back to Codelia and her bad experience. She’s back with the rest of the PCs, and she’s feeling intensely stupid and self-destructive. Being a social monster, she’s decided, mostly unconsciously, that the way to deal with this is to make someone else just as miserable as she is. She’s picked out Krellit, the Geeky Mechanic ™ of the party, as the most logical candidate, i.e. the one most likely to, you should pardon the expression, fall for it. It hasn’t really dawned on her yet that this is going to be Bad for Party Cohesiveness. It should have dawned, mind, but I mentioned stupid and self-destructive, right?
Cordelia is aware that Krellit, not being an idiot, knows she can literally bluff the pants off him should she so desire. So she went into it pretending to be awkward–the theory being that when blindsided by real emotion she’s just as unsure as anyone else. And he went for it, and they have started a sexual relationship. Which led to an issue.
It occurred to me that, while I am aware of the in-bed competence of Krellit’s player, Krellit the character is a different story. And at some point I said, “Um…I have to roll dice.” And the GM looked at me and asked for what, and Krellit’s player and I said, pretty much in unison, “Bluff”; that is, Cordelia was faking it (“I’ll have what she’s having.”). Which led to the slightly injured question on Krellit’s player’s part of why I thought she was going to have to fake it. How did we know Krellit wasn’t an erotic genius?
Unsurprisingly, D&D doesn’t have a “Have Sex” skill. It also doesn’t have anywhere in particular that one can be shoehorned in, with the exception of Perform. Problem is, Perform is Charisma-based, which leads to the ludicrous conclusion that unattractive people are ipso facto lousy lovers. Amid much laughter, the GM went for Sense Motive on the strength of “paying attention to body language”, which was amusing but not IMO quite right. Me, I’d go for a Dex-based Perform, or just a whole new skill, with possibly a Con check for how long the characters can, and I swear no pun is intended here, keep it up.
But anyway. My problem is that I love D&D, I really do, and at the same time I adore games that center on or at least include issues that D&D just isn’t equipped to handle. In some games, Cordelia’s identity issues would have gotten her extra points or provide a mechanic in some situations; in D&D it’s basically me looking at the GM and saying “I want to have a plotline involving this.” (Note that the GM has provided one, it’s just that he had to do it with no system support pretty much at all.) Similarly, it would be amusing if Cordelia discovered that Krellit’s watched enough porn to have a, hmmm, firm grasp of the basics and that she was actually having a good time, even if not so good a time as she pretended; lacking any way to work it out, we fall back on the image of the hopeless techie (“You! Have you ever kissed a girl!?”).
I don’t know as I have any coherent point here, aside from a personal preference for Gamist mechanics and Narrativist play. It’s just so hard to abstract things like a brilliant conversationalist…
In Her Web She Still Delights 